Editorial: The limits of free speech

Published 2:57 pm, Saturday, July 12, 2014

Theresa Gorey, left, hands out pamphlets in front of a Planned Parenthood office in Boston, June 27, 2014. The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a seven-year-old Massachusetts law that created a no-protest buffer zone around abortion clinics; Boston officials plan to send police to provide additional security here in anticipation of renewed protests. (Katherine Taylor/The New York Times) ORG XMIT: XNYT123

The ideal of equal justice for all requires more consistency from the bench.

Two recent court decisions, one by the highest court in the land, the other from a town justice in central New York, offer an unsettling picture of the state of free speech in America.

Taken together, the message from the cases is this: Shouting protesters are free to intimidate a woman on her way to an abortion clinic, but citizens face jail time for demonstrating even peacefully outside a secure military base. The right of free speech trumps a woman's privacy but not the tranquility of a government installation.

And here's a further bit of legal parsing: Sometimes a sidewalk or street is public property. Sometimes it is not.

The June 26 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Massachusetts' 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics. The divided court said the law was overly broad and violated anti-abortion demonstrators' free speech right. Part of the case involved a Boston clinic where protesters said the buffer zone extended from the parking lot and put them too far away from the clinic's front door.

A different limit of free speech is being drafted in the Syracuse suburb of DeWitt, home to Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, from which the 174th Fighter Wing flies drones over Afghanistan.

Among the protesters who have been demonstrating there for years is Mary Anne Grady-Flores, a 58-year-old grandmother of three from Ithaca, who has, the Post-Standard reports, been arrested several times, including in October 2012, when she and others blocked entrances to the base. With the case pending, the court issued an order of protection for Col. Earl Evans, mission support group commander at the base, directing the defendants not to go to his home, school, or workplace. It was an unusual use of such an order, which is normally employed in more personal situations like domestic violence or stalking. The protesters had never personally bothered the officer; clearly the order — which applied whether he was there or not — was designed to keep them away from the base.

But Ms. Grady-Flores returned to the scene in February 2013. She says she took pains not to violate the order and did not participate in the demonstration that day. Instead, she stood in the intersection to take pictures, assuming the public road was not base property — an issue over which there was so much confusion that an earlier case had been dismissed. But in Ms. Grady-Flores' case, it was determined that the base's property extends halfway into the street.

She was convicted in May, and on Thursday sentenced Thursday to a year in jail and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine.

Certainly people engaged in civil disobedience should be accountable. But for the justice system to be fair, it cannot set arbitrary boundaries or protect only the rights of certain people. Nor should rights hinge on how much money, legal muscle or political controversy people bring to the courtroom, or which side of the ideological divide they're on.